Best way to check if mysql_query returned any results?

I'm looking for the best way to check and see if any results were returned in a query. I feel like I write this part of code a lot and sometimes I get errors, and sometimes I don't.

For example, I run this query to check if a username exists before inserting a new one into the database.

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM ...");

Then I want to check and see if any results were returned. Here is one way I do it:

if (!$result) { PERFORM ACTION }

If the first way doesn't work, then sometimes this will:

if (mysql_num_rows($result)==0) { PERFORM ACTION }

Then I even saw that I could do it this way the other day:

list($total) = mysql_fetch_row($result);
if ($total==0) { PERFORM ACTION }

What is the best way to do this?

Solution 1:

if (mysql_num_rows($result)==0) { PERFORM ACTION }

For PHP 5 and 7 and above use mysqli:

if (mysqli_num_rows($result)==0) { PERFORM ACTION }

Solution 2:

One way to do it is to check what mysql_num_rows returns. A minimal complete example would be the following:

if ($result = mysql_query($sql) && mysql_num_rows($result) > 0) {
    // there are results in $result
} else {
    // no results
}

But it's recommended that you check the return value of mysql_query and handle it properly in the case it's false (which would be caused by an error); probably by also calling mysql_error and logging the error somewhere.

Solution 3:

Whenever we do queries to get some data, it is returned as an object. Then most of us convert it to array for looping through the rows easily. In php "empty()" function is used to check if an array is empty i.e. if it has no data in it. So we can check if returned array representation of query isn't empty by doing like this

if(!empty($result)){
           //DO STUFF
}